Welcome to part 3 of the NFS Best Practices series of posts. While part 1 looked at networking and part 2 looked at configuration options, this next post will look at interoperability with vSphere features. We are primarily interested in features which are in some way related to storage, and NFS storage in particular. While many of my regular readers will be well versed in most of these technologies, I’m hoping there will still be some items of interest. Most of the interoperability features are tried and tested with NFS, but I will try to highlight areas that might be…
In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues, Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.
Another feature which was introduced in vSphere 5.1 & vCloud Director 5.1 was the interoperability between vCloud Director & Storage DRS. Now vCloud Director can use datastore clusters for the placements of vCloud vApps, and allow Storage DRS do what it does best – choose the best datastore in the datastore cluster for the initial placement of the vApp, and then load balance the capacity and performance of the datastores through the use of Storage vMotion.
vSphere 5.1 introduced a number of vCloud Director (vCD) interoperability features from a storage perspective, namely ability to take VM snapshots from within the vCD UI, interoperability with Storage Profiles and interoperability with Storage DRS. Admittedly, its been a while since I played with vCD and I am a little rusty, but I wanted to see how well these storage features worked with vCD 5.1. I’ll follow-up with some future posts on how this all integrates, but this first post is just to highlight an issue I ran into in my haste to get the environment up and running. The…
This post will look at Storage DRS enhancements in vSphere 5.1.